I think my error was persisting with hardware that wasn't up to the task.

But thats half the fun.... finding a solution to the problem in front of you!

I'd quite like to play with an older system like that in a small form factor, see how far you could strip and optimise to get the system to do what you want. With brutefir that system could have run many more filters than required and have head room to spare.... with the right install.

But thats half the fun.... finding a solution to the problem in front of you!

But the hours, Theo404, the hours......

Quote:

I'd quite like to play with an older system like that in a small form factor, see how far you could strip and optimise to get the system to do what you want. With brutefir that system could have run many more filters than required and have head room to spare.... with the right install.

Unix-man: This is Cool. I can stop my Alsa Upgrade Script maintenance for now. THX.

BTW:

Did I tell you guys that I am running a Squeezzebox (SBR -"without controller" @ 110€) now?

Sounds quite good out of the box.
Tweaked even (much) better. ( I2S tapping off is pretty easy.)
Not any implications of PC/OS.
Operation is fun.
Runs at a fragment of cost of any other comparable solution.
Opensource
Supports native 44.1 ( there's a quartz which can easily be upgraded)
Lowest energy usage
Galvanically isolated through ethernet
Lot's of plugins or other gadgets/configs can be applied - even brutefir for convolution.
Multidevice support

Operation with iPeng on the iPhone is just great.
Coverarts on the iPhone
Extreme fast database access
Supports even wav tag guessing very well. ( You can handle wav albums the same way as files with tags.)

What more do I want? A well working solution covering my entire house. It can be handled by the entire family without facing a compromise on sound quality.
And not to forget - still running a Linux system and network.

Why didn't somebody tell me earlier.

Folks. Get you one to play with over the holidays. Highly recommended.

Soundcheck-
How could we have known? I think the Squeezeboxes are great for what they are intended for. Logitech is having trouble marketing them since The parent company isn't sure why someone would buy one. I have 3 and for distributed audio they work very well.

However only a few models support higher than 48 KHz sampling and even then its limited to 96. For access to the 176 and 192 content you must go elsewhere.

They are imminently modifiable (start with a good, well isolated linear power supply) and use an external DAC.

You still need a server and Linux seems to be a very good choice to build on. The Vortex box is a great candidate for a server. Unfortunately Linux is a poor place to get good metadata since the best metadata sources are inside walled gardens with ugly guards.

The mechanism used by some players and squeezebox is called tag-guessing.

In the end the filename gets cut into fields. We are not talking about embedded tags.

E.g:

Tracknum-Artist-Album-Track

You can tell squeezebox server how you want to have it structured.
The server tries to match the pattern. If it works, the server fills up the db-fields accordingly.
Key factor is the field separator - it defines the number of fields.

This requires that your filenames are 100% consistently following above pattern. One dash more in the name and it won't fly ( at least on squeezebox server -- MPD-Minion was a bit smarter here).

I am almost done cleaning up my filenames for Squeezebox. 95% were OK.

It gets a bit more tricky with various artists cds. The track field needs to contain the track-artist and the trackname.